Embodied Practice Workshop: Ecology, Embodiment and Entanglements

Join us to explore ecology through the lens of embodiment and the collective. No prior experience in performance required.

The Department of Drama is inviting you to explore ecology through the lens of embodiment and the collective in a 3-hour workshop with Martha Cosgrove and David Alves. How do our senses attune us to our everyday environments? How do our bodies connect us to histories and narratives that matter to how we live now? How do we tell a story about ecology where our individual stories entangle with our local surroundings and beyond?

Drawing on eco-performance practices, this workshop invites participants to embrace their identities and ground in their space to weave connections through the senses. It will engage with memory, lineage and communication to reimagine how we live within fragile ecosystems. Our endeavour is to activate conversations, feelings and sensations to investigate how a diverse community of learning and research can develop a shared language towards sustainable living.

This workshop does not require any prior experience in performance; rather, we seek to share our methodologies and experience and learn from yours. This is a free event, but booking is required, and the number of participants is limited.

The workshop is organised as a satellite event of Green Week and the module “Staying with the Trouble: Ecology and Performance” (designed and taught by Céline Thobois-Gupta) to celebrate the launch of the Department of Drama’s first module on ecology and the spring equinox.

Martha Cosgrove is a theatre facilitator, maker and manager. She has a passion for ecological art and for engaging communities in environmental themes through sensory, embodied and participatory work. She is a core artist on the environmental arts programme We Are Nature Protecting Itself delivered by Tallaght Community Arts. She is a frequent facilitator with SoloSIRENs theatre company, co-facilitating the company’s primary school workshop series on anti-racism and interculturalism, and also regularly facilitates with Freshly Ground Theatre. Martha graduated with First Class Honours Degree from Drama and Theatre Studies in Trinity College Dublin in 2025.

David Alves is a theatre artist working through devised performance, movement, and embodied research. Their practice is rooted in the rehearsal room and in live encounter, and they create work that emerges from the body’s relationship to space, material, and environment. They are particularly committed to developing physical and site-responsive theatrical languages that explore Afro-Indigenous and queer identities, and belonging beyond text-led forms. David is currently a recipient of ITI’s Six in the Attic residency, after being a member of Weft Studio with Dublin Fringe, and they have also undertaken a Coiscéim residency.